We didn’t leave our hearts in San Francisco, but we did leave our coats in Los Angeles International Airport.

For many years they served us well. I had my olive TXT coat since 1999. Some seams are starting to come undone and the pockets have a few holes. It’s still quite usable.

But as we head to warmer climes, we no longer need them.

They will likely spend a few weeks in Lost & Found purgatory at LAX. Then, we hope, they will find new lives with deserving new owners.

Governments are listening and tinkering with their economies to foster creative industries like design, architecture, software, video games, and film. The benefits, those important-sounding economists say, are multiple: urban regeneration, higher wages as jobs upgrade from service and manufacturing, flourishing cultural scenes that attract tourism, modernized educational programs that generate talent… the list goes on.

I’m looking at how well-positioned Montreal, my home city, is for this new economy. What are the cultural and social structures that promote creative thinking? Where to the creative types gather to exchange ideas and launch projects? How effective are government incentives? How well do big companies scout creative talent and put their ideas to commercial use?

Vancouver, where I spent 10 days, can be considered Montreal’s rival creative city. Both provincial governments joust for the attention of foreign video game and film companies. Both have fairly liberal attitudes that attract artistic types. So my research has expanded into a comparison of both cities to see which has an edge.

Although both cities share much in common, they are astoundingly different: in attitude, in values, in expectations. Both have vastly disparate influences whether from immigration, natural setting, and political sensibilities.

It was fun coming up with single words that define each city and help understand their unique engines of creative thought.

Vancouver is water, Montreal is ice.
Vancouver is Asian, Montreal is European.
Vancouver is coastal, Montreal is continental.
Vancouver is mountain, Montreal is trees.
Vancouver is glass, Montreal is stone.
Vancouver is pot, Montreal is ecstasy.
Vancouver is nude, Montreal is lingerie.
Vancouver is an early bird, Montreal is a night owl.
Vancouver is androgynous, Montreal is feminine.
Vancouver is kayak, Montreal is patio.
Vancouver is organic, Montreal is cosmetic.
Vancouver is green, Montreal is mauve.
Vancouver is Javascript, Montreal is Python.
Vancouver is young and bold, Montreal is old and cautious.
Vancouver is extroverted, Montreal is introspective.
Vancouver seeks interaction, Montreal avoids eye contact.
Vancouver is latte, Montreal is café au lait.
Vancouver is India pale ale, Montreal is Weissbier.
Vancouver is sushi, Montreal is smoked meat.

What words would you use to describe both cities?

We were lucky to know a lot of people in Vancouver, long-time residents, who told us the best places to go. We happily pass their tips on to you.

Yaletown on the cheap

The downtown enclave of Yaletown is associated with yuppies, playboys, and gold-diggers. It’s not hard to see why with all the high-end boutiques and pricey restos the line its Modern-styled streets.

But we found a few gems for the budget-minded visitor:

Raw Canvas
1046 Hamilton St.

A total misfit among the swank businesses, this café-art studio is artsy to its organic chai core. Half of it is bar and bistro, while the back is a painting garage where, starting at $45, you get a blank canvas and full access to paints and brushes. Workshops, live music and poetry reading are regular events.

The menu is simple but bold: there’s a surprisingly tasty espresso chai latte made with actual chai spices, not a bag or a syrup. A sandwich of local cured meats and a knockout mustard was as remarkable as the decor. All of it came under $12.

Paige, the charming owner, tells me that all ingredients are bio-dynamic, which is organic squared: they are raised in a closed ecosystem that emulates natural cycles of nutrients: cow poop on pasture breeds worms, which feeds the chickens, whose poop fertilizes the pasture that feeds the cow…

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Rodney’s Oyster House
1228 Hamilton St.

Just a few doors down is a seafood eatery with a definitive nautical feel. From 3-6pm it has “Low Tide Specials”, generous servings of oysters, mussels, clams or salmon for $10 each. At the oyster bar, a staffer tosses the crustaceans like flair bartenders with bottles.

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Shakin’ not Stirred Lounge & Grill
1144 Homer St

The waitresses laugh if you say something they don’t understand, presumably thinking you attempted a joke, even though you were speaking in a foreign tongue to your dinner mates. This shows the somewhat forced level of service.

But no matter, you’re there for the cozy den-like atmosphere and appetizers sold at half-price before 6pm. “Appetizer” is a funny descriptor, as they’re enough to kill, not coax an appetite. I made the mistake of ordering two. I was full after the first.

Highly recommended is the spicy calamari, a half-fried, half-sautéed mess with Thai flavours.

Another gem about town

Medina Café
556 Beatty St

It’s always full, which speaks to the quality of its brunches and waffles. To them, eggs are accessories, not highlights. They’ll throw them poached in a tagine with Moroccan-style meatballs, or [see menu]

It’s not cheap, though: dishes range from $11 to $14, which makes them ideal for sharing among two. You’ll fill the remaining space with their fantastic Belgian waffles, which come with one of several incredible sauces, like lavender chocolate or salted caramel.

Other local-endorsed spots we didn’t try

Blue Water Café – 1095 Hamilton St.
Some good-looking seafood dishes.
Sha Lin Noodle House – 548 West Broadway
Authentic and cheap Chinese.
Gorilla Food – 436 Richards St.
Raw and vegan joint.
Finch’s Tea and Coffee House – 353 West Pender St.
Highly recommended for breakfast and sandwiches.

Learning to ski at 30 is a great exercise in embracing complete and utter lack of control.

Every segment of the skiing experience challenges your ability to let go. To accept that power is a temporary illusion at microscopic scale. There’s the line to rent the equipment that you can’t rush or skip. There’s the ski lift that will keep going whether you’re ready for it or not.

And there’s the mountain itself that only cares about getting slippery things off its face as quickly as gravity allows.

After five minutes on Whistler Mountain, I was about to call it quits and find the nearest bar. I couldn’t stop myself from sliding into the trees without deliberately planting my ass in the snow. I couldn’t turn. And when I fell, I couldn’t stand up again. I could only watch the other skiers in their downhill ballet, which they no doubt learned at the age of five, when you have no fear and an unfair centre of gravity.

It was like one of those nightmares where you try to run away but can’t.

I was halfway down my first run – the easiest on the mountain, according to the map – and didn’t want to keep going.  To continue to the bottom meant another 10 minutes of hard, icy snow on a slope too steep for comfort, which meant more bruises and more fearing for my life. I was stranded,  but Bianca convinced me to go further up the mountain where the snow was fresher. That meant not finishing the run, but clambering uphill, in ski boots, to the gondola. Fifteen minutes of fighting gravity. I was tired, sweaty, discouraged.

We men are especially bad at this. Men define themselves by their physical prowess. We lift heavy objects. We reach high places. We fix things. It makes us feel valuable and useful. Men draw their strength from their strength; we’re meta-Samsons.

Take this strength away and we become bland wads of cottage cheese. That’s why men whine so much when they’re sick. We can’t stand feeling physically weak.

The fresh snow was better, but I wasn’t. I kept trying to remember my first lesson: to turn right, press down with your left foot. Control your speed by turning uphill. It was useless. I just kept getting speed, and more speed meant a bigger concussion when I would inevitably smash into a pine.

A girl skier stopped in front of me as I one again sat mid-slope post-fall, gathering strength like someone about to yank off a sticky Band-Aid.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “I’m scared shitless,” I said. “It’s okay. You just need to relax,” she responded. “When people relax, that’s when they get it.” And off she went.

Lazy advice, I thought. Sounds like any generic self-help hack that appears on Oprah.

As is often the case with clichés, it was right. By my fourth descent down the green run known as Whiskey Jack, I didn’t lose my skis on a nasty stumble. I was going faster knowing I could slow down, even if it meant deploying the ass brakes. During a turn I felt like a street racer on a sideways drift, not a twerp hurtling out of control. I was calmly working with the mountain, not against it.

It’s funny that some skiers talk about taming the mountain. They’re not doing shit to it. It’s been there for millions of years. The skiers tame themselves, their fear, their muscular coordination, their impatience. When everything else is beyond their control, they master the only domain they can.

Clichés have a bad habit of showing up uninvited, and like the girl’s advice to relax, so does this hark back to another tired morsel of popular wisdom: that a person has control over nothing but himself and how he reacts to situations. I didn’t speed up the waiting lines or order the ice to increase its surface friction coefficient.

But each subsequent tumble felt less like a defeat, and more like a tight handshake with the mighty mountain.

There were no naked people at Vancouver’s Wreck Beach, but there was a greying hippie feeding seagulls and a friendly bearded fella named Cloud.

This would have to suffice as a taste of this naturist mecca, where in the summer, thousands gather wearing nothing but a smile.

We happened on this notorious beach by chance: the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia was charging $14 a person, a few notches above the limits of reason for budget travelers.

So we walked around the building instead and happened upon a totem pole park and an art installation of tiny white plastic boats sticking out of the gravel. This, we thought, would have to be our discounted moment of culture for the day.

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But just beyond the poles was a promising nature trail that led to a steep zig-zag of stairs. It seemed to descend into the thick woods, with no end in sight. But soon a sign warned us that below was a clothing-optional beach.

Eight degrees and cloudy is too nippy for even the most dedicated nudist, but traces of the naturist savoir-faire were evident. Like the white-haired Tommy Chong lookalike with a throwing breadcrumbs at the seagulls. When we passed by, his birds took flight. For this, I apologized.

“They have wings, so they’re quite mobile,” he spoke in a lazy bullfrog drawl. “We only wish we could fly like them.” And without looking our way, he resumed his feeding ceremony.

Art?

Our attention was then caught by a young fella with a full black beard and an olive hoodie. He seemed to be drawing in the sand with two sticks that were taller than him. When I approached, I saw that he had carved an eight-figure in the sand, in which water from a nearby spring was flowing.

“It’s a filtration system for the animals,” said the friendly sculptor who calls himself Cloud. He’d been doing this for seven years, he told me. He comes to the beach a few times a week and arranges sticks and clay that trap impurities from the water dribbling down the beach cliff.

He pointed to an accumulation just past a miniature dam of sticks he made. “See, this is almost clean enough for you and me to drink,” he said. But it’s good enough for the dogs that come walking. But why the eight figure?

“So there’s a water circulation system. That way the mosquitoes don’t nest.”

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Cloud’s water purification system at Wreck Beach.

I asked his permission to take his picture. He took his sticks and walked towards the shoreline, saying, “I’m going to play. You can shoot me while I do that.” With this, he twirled his sticks like a circus performer or a martial artist. Or a West Coast beach filter engineer, for all we knew.

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The stairs back to campus were just as treacherous, and the sight of a hot dog stand claiming to be the best in town – or your money back – offered an irresistible challenge.

It’s manned by a friendly Asian lady and her Mexican assistant. Tourists emerging from an Olympic women’s hockey game,  drunk enough to fancy themselves great seducers, hardly managed to fluster them. “Oh, I’m too busy with school to go out with you,” the señorita would say as she handed one such lothario his dog.

A regular hot dog costs $4. One of eight flavoured “smokies” – sausages, essentially – go for $6.50. Not budget prices, but it’s understandable. They come topped with drilled onions and you have six condiments and 10 sauces to choose from.

I had the “volcanic” smokie, meant to be spicy, but it gave me a slight tingle. Bianca had the Cajun. Both were delicious. I highly recommend the cranberry chipotle sauce or the jalapeño barbecue sauce to give the dogs a little more emotion.

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Trip summary

Costs per person
Bus fare to UBC: $2.50
Museum of Anthropology: $14
Hot dog and drink: $8

Highlights
Stunning view of the sea and mountains
Brisk climb and and down wooded steps
Glimpse of Vancouver hippies/naturists in their element

Bob Blumer is a madman, and therefore, my favourite TV chef. So when we were invited to an event promoting BC tourism with him as host, we had no choice but to go.

He didn’t cook anything, which was a disappointment. But thanks to him, we learned what a geoduck is and that Hollandaise sauce is a perfect condiment for oysters.

And we saw that B.C. makes some pretty mean microbrewed beers and ciders. So the media event to which we were invited did its job: we’re convinced BC is serious about food.

Here are some photos from the event.

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Tourist-friendly First Nations dancers regaled the audience.

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Raw geoduck with an Asian-inspired vinaigrette.

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Bob and me: Like Barry White fathered thousands of children, Blumer has been responsible for many memorable dinner parties. He liked hearing this.

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Our first press pass as travel bloggers.

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Photo by WhyNotThisOne

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The last time I was in Montreal’s domestic departure lounge was due to terrorism. Some fanatical wind-up monkey had just tried to ignite some fluid containers in an airplane and my newspaper put me on the first flight to Toronto to chronicle the beginnings of what is now the entirely normal age of deadly toothpaste.

It was a mess.

This time, the domestic terminal is homier. The seats look more comfortable, even if they are identical to the international side. It’s roomier; the Starbucks has patio tables scattered around it. It lacks that hard Tetris arrangement of shops and food-warming franchises.

That my first flight on my one-year round-the-world trip is a domestic one feels slightly symbolic on a few levels. For one, I’m avoiding the multiple hoops of Gestapo-inspired screenings between check-in and a U.S.-bound gate.

Using a driver’s licence as ID to board a flight? Wow.

These bonus comforts combine to create what seems like a softer transition into the nomadic life. I’m traveling across the continent, but I’m still in my country. The vast distance is assuaged by familiarity.

As such, I have not yet fully realized the enormity of what I’m about to embark on.

Last night, as I delivered some bags to Bianca’s mother for safekeeping, she grabbed me by the shoulders and tried to shake me from what seemed like a stupor of denial. “Do you realize what you’re about to do,” she urged me.

Kind of. I was divesting of my last possessions I wouldn’t be taking with me. I was en route to another friend’s house to re-swap some long-ago swapped DVDs. I was hoping to see my neighbour one last time before cleaning the apartment where I’m couchsurfing.

Immediate details. Trees obstructing the deep, intimidating forest.

I’m sure Vancouver will be fun and parts of it exotic. But I doubt I’ll feel that ball of ice in my stomach that many long-term travelers relate when realize the decision they made.

Soon after handing them the keys, I moved to my neighbour’s couch for two nights, the first of several temporary crash pads that would have me while I remained in Montreal before the trip. It’s an old building where the apartments, and their completely unrelated inhabitants, are separated by a single sheet of drywall.

You get to know your neighbours reasonably well even if you never talk to them.

The subletters we found were perfect: an affable couple in their 40s, solid jobs, and needed a fully-furnished apartment for precisely one year. We liked them right away.

But the exchange of keys is supposed to mark the climax of that relationship. They get the apartment, I get out. The place where I slept, ate, cleaned myself, that was my hyperbaric chamber of solace, was now legally off-limits.

To hear strangers, no matter how friendly, assume what minutes ago was your castle is the oddest kind of voluntary intrusion. They played the CD I had forgotten in my stereo and shut it off after four seconds, apparently unimpressed with my taste. I think I heard them remark on my DVD collection.

It wasn’t like sharing your toothbrush or lending your underwear. It was far more intimate than that. I was at a slumber party with all my past lovers and forced to watch my subletters fondle each one in their sleep.

The second night was better. Less sound bled through. They had settled in. As much as I had hoped for a sign of resistance from my apartment, a brief rebellion against a sudden new master, it embraced them completely.

If I had any illusion of canceling my trip on a frightened whim and resuming my familiar routine, this pretty much euthanized it.

Ask 10 backpackers what one should carry on a long trip and you might as well ask them their favourite movies. The answers will be just as disparate.

When you’re living for several months with only what you carry on your shoulders, packing becomes an intensely personal affair. Yes, there are the utilitarian basics, but trying to agree on a standard list is as productive as – ALERT: nerd reference – counseling Mac and PC disciples on the principles of empathy.

To wit: see this list on nine useless things travelers tend to pack. I disagree with six of them. Guy sounds like he never left his city limits. But to him, it makes sense.

And so, here is a partial list of the things that make sense for us to carry for one year on a 50-liter pack each.

For him:

2 T-shirts
1 collared short-sleeved shirt
1 button short-sleeve shirt
1 button long-sleeve shirt
1 light fleece jacket
1 pair pants
1 pair convertible zip-off pants
1 pair shorts
1 pair swim shorts
1 pair of “speedo” style swimsuit
Socks and underwear
1 pair all-purpose walking shoes
1 pair sandals
Rain poncho
Sleeping sack
Traveler towel
Brazilian flag (it’s World Cup year, after all)
Money belt
Flashlight
LED belt clip light
Swiss army knife
Nylon clothesline
Duct tape
Compass keychain
Pandeiro (percussion instrument)
Toiletry bag

Shared items:

13″ MacBook
iPod Touch with external battery pack
Camera
Gorillapod flexible tripod
Voice recorder with clip-on microphone
SteriPEN UV water purifier
Plug converters
Flexible bowls
Waterproof bag
Platypus 1-liter foldable water bottle
Snorkel

For her:

Hell, I don’t even want to try to list this. I’ll let her do it later.